Mildred
Loving always insisted she was no civil rights pioneer, but Loving. v.
Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that bears her name, established
the legal right to interracial marriage across the United States.In memory of Mildred Loving, who died on May 2, 2008, University of Oregon historian Peggy Pascoe, author of the new book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America , discusses the many meanings of Loving v. Virginia.

When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter decided to get married in June
1958, laws banning interracial marriage had been in effect for nearly
three centuries. The colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts
had banned intermarriage in 1664, 1691, and 1705. After the American
Revolution, states passed similar laws. During the Civil War,
interracial marriage acquired a new name--"miscegenation"-and
miscegenation laws became the foundation for the system of racial
segregation in railroads, schools, parks, and cemeteries that prevailed
into the 1960s. When this regime was at its height, 30 states banned
interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying
Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.
Judges justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was
somehow "unnatural," a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94
percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage.

Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter had grown up in Central Point,
Virginia, a town so tiny that whites, blacks, and Indians had been
mixing as far back as anyone could remember. Richard was the son of a
"white" truck driver who worked for a well-off "Negro" farmer.
Mildred, who said she was "part negro and part Indian," fit into the
catch-all category of "colored." The labels "white" and "colored"
carried enough weight that Richard and Mildred attended different
schools and churches. Still, they knew each other even before they met
at a local dance and started dating. When Richard was 24 and Mildred
was 18, they decided to get married.

Richard knew they had no hope of getting a license in Virginia, so the pair traveled toWashington,
D.C. to get married, returning with a marriage certificate that they
framed and placed on a wall of the home they shared with Mildred's
parents. Most of their Central Point neighbors paid little attention
to the marriage, but someone told the Caroline County sheriff, who
vowed to put a stop to it. The newlyweds had lived together for a
little more than a month when they were awakened in the middle of the
night by the sheriff and his deputies, who walked through the unlocked
door of the house and right into the Lovings' bedroom to arrest them.

Their trial was
held before Judge Leon Bazile, a staunch supporter of Virginia's miscegenation law,
which set prison sentences for "any white person and colored person" who left
the state to get married and then returned to Virginia. Bazile imposed a one-year sentence, which he then
suspended on the condition that Richard and Mildred "leave Caroline County and
the state of Virginia at once and do not return together or at the same time to
said county and state for a period of twenty-five years." Effectively banished, the frightened young
couple returned to Washington. D.C., where they lived for the next four years,
raising three children while desperately missing their families and friends.

Mildred Loving
was miserable in Washington. In 1963 she
took a cousin's advice and wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking
if the civil rights bill being debated in Congress might lift Judge Bazile's restriction
on living in Virginia with her husband.
Kennedy sent her letter to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which
asked attorney Bernard Cohen to look into the matter. Cohen and Phil Hirschkop, another ACLU lawyer,
persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court, which had been avoiding the issue of
interracial marriage, to hear the Lovings' case. On June 12, 1967, the Court unanimously
declared Virginia's miscegenation law-and those of all the rest of the states,
too-unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl
Warren ruled that bans on interracial marriage violated both the equal
protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the constitutional requirement
of due process. Marriage, Warren
declared, was one of "the basic civil rights."

The Supreme
Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia
was the culmination of decades of attempts to overturn miscegenation laws. Filipino immigrant men, the Catholic
Interracial Council of Los Angeles, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the
ACLU all played a part. The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's leading
force against racism in the law, blew hot and cold about interracial marriage. In 1913, the NAACP fought hard against a rash
of attempts to pass miscegenation laws in northeastern states, but in the
1950s, its Legal Defense Fund (LDF) feared that any mention of interracial
marriage would endanger its campaign against school segregation. In 1964, however, the LDF cast off its doubts
and asked the Supreme Court to overturn a Florida law against interracial
cohabitation, laying the legal path the ACLU would follow in Loving.

When Loving v. Virginia was decided on June
12, 1967, it established once and for all that interracial marriage was
legal. The case spurred a significant increase
in public approval of interracial marriage among both whites and blacks, and it
forced even the most reluctant southern states to remove miscegenation laws
from their books. It should be noted,
though, that Alabama did not repeal its state constitutional ban on interracial
marriage until 2000.

By then, Loving v. Virginia had become an icon of
equality and an inspiration to a variety of social movements and political
causes. Every June 12th, a group called
Loving Day.Org sponsors celebrations of the legality of interracial marriage in
cities all across the U.S. Multiracial
families consider Loving the
lodestone of their movement, which demands, among other things, that a
multiracial category be placed in the U.S. census. Gays and lesbians invoke Loving to argue that the government has no more business using
marriage to discriminate on the basis of sex than it did using marriage to
discriminate on the basis of race (a position Mildred Loving herself endorsed
in 2007). The Loving decision is also, and increasingly, praised by political
conservatives, especially those who oppose affirmative action; they see Loving as a beacon of the colorblind
ideal they have, however belatedly, decided to champion.

Richard Loving
died in a car accident in 1975, but Mildred Loving lived long enough to see the
changes brought by her marriage and the court case that followed. She had grown up in a world where the
police, the courts, and public opinion were adamantly opposed to interracial
marriage, and she had long since developed the habit of staying out of public
view. Right up until her death on May 2,
2008, she denied having been a civil rights pioneer. But, of course, she was.

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